“Fair suck of the sav,” said Goos, which I took it meant he was as surprised as I about Merriwell. Goos’s English had basically been preserved in amber and was spoken as if he were still nineteen, the age when he left Australia.
The ICC’s protocols called for the prosecution of leaders rather than grunts who would claim they were just following orders. Therefore, if several hundred Roma had been massacred by American troops, General Merriwell would be our top target. Accordingly, his offer to speak to me contradicted what any good criminal lawyer—including me—would have told him, namely, Keep your mouth shut. The penitentiaries were full of guys who’d boosted their proclaimed innocence with lies that led them to the slammer.
“We can’t say no,” said Goos. In an investigation in which US law barred any cooperation from the American military, it would be impossible to refuse even one self-serving interview. “But,” he added, “this is going to make the old man very, very nervous.”
He was referring to Badu. The prosecutor, as well as the president of the Court—a judge who served as the chief executive—were chosen by the member countries, which meant Badu was best off avoiding controversies that might inflame any faction. The Pre-Trial Chamber’s order in my “Situation” had authorized the investigation to proceed only within the “territorial scope” of the OTP application, which naturally made no mention of the US. In fact, given the Service-Members’ Act, conducting an ICC investigation on US soil was probably illegal.
I called back Roger to make these points, but within twenty-four hours he had proposed that Merriwell and I meet in a conference room in the BiH Embassy in DC, which under international law was sovereign Bosnian territory. The Bosnians, like many others, revered Merriwell and would never deny him so simple a request.
With that, I scheduled a meeting with Badu and Akemi in hopes of gaining their approval. We sat in Badu’s corner office at a white conference table beside a wall of floor-length windows. Badu was at the head, while Akemi placed herself in the corner, with a legal pad. With her dark face always seemingly engraved by worry, Akemi was at the Court, with her door open, no matter how early I arrived or how late I left, usually scribbling like mad on the stacks of documents in front of her. Although she was my supervisor, my conversations with her were rare, since she was frugal with words and difficult to understand anyway. She spoke that Japanese version of English, cultivated at their universities, which is largely a dialect unto itself. Although Akemi’s office was only two doors down, I had taken to e-mailing her about virtually everything.
Badu was equally inscrutable for far different reasons. He was a large, amiable man, past seventy, hefty and bald, and a renowned authority on international law. He spoke beautiful, musical English and was composed and charming in his aloof way, clearly fit for the ceremonial aspect of his job, in which he received the diplomatic representatives of various nations. But beyond amiable chatter, virtually everything he said seemed to miss the point. He was the master of the grave nod or understanding chuckle, both of which he applied at deft intervals when his subordinates spoke. But he rarely responded directly to questions or suggestions. When I explained the possibility of seeing Merriwell, Badu kept repeating, “Very unusual, very unusual,” and then added his light laugh, without offering more.
It was widely assumed around the Court that most critical decisions within the OTP were actually made by Akemi. As an example, I was told that it was she who had finally pushed through the encrusted layers of resistance to investigating Barupra. But she was reluctant about me interviewing Merriwell. She agreed that a conversation with the general in the Bosnian Embassy was technically lawful, but she said the Court, whose expenses were annually audited by the UN, could never pay for an investigatory trip to the US.
Ordinarily, that would have been definitive. But for weeks, my ex–law partners had been nagging me to return to the Tri-Cities to discuss a criminal price-fixing investigation of Kindle County’s oil refiners, who for decades had charged the highest prices in the country. It took a few days, but my former clients confirmed that they would be only too happy to pay for the best seat on the plane. When I explained I could make the trip with no expense to the Court, Akemi had no way to refuse permission.
So I prepared to head home. There was also family business waiting for me. Not long after I’d announced my plans to move to The Hague, my younger son, Pete, and his girlfriend, Brandi, had come to tell me they were engaged. Ellen and I had tried to schedule a celebratory dinner with Brandi’s parents, but the Rosenbergs were still wintering in Florida when I left. Now I called my ex to see if we could make arrangements for Saturday night, April 11, which worked out. Roger, in the meantime, said Merriwell could see me at 3 p.m. on April 10, a couple of hours after I landed at Dulles.
The last step was to ask Esma to notify Ferko that we would need to see him in Barupra, where I would head from the US. She had called me a number of times in the interval, ostensibly to see what we had heard from the Bosnians. Because of the time difference with New York, we ended up connecting at the end of her court day, which was late at night in The Hague. Once we’d dealt with business, Esma inevitably prolonged the conversations with questions about my kids or stories about herself.
I especially enjoyed her anecdotes about growing up with four sibs in a motor home. She described her father as a con who preyed on the elderly, and a brute who beat his wife and children. Her revenge was to go to school wherever they camped. Because it was forbidden for Roma girls to associate with gadjos after puberty, her father had her expelled from the Gypsy nation when she went to university. She claimed not to have cared.
Interesting as Esma was, the perils with her remained obvious and I found myself trying to limit our phone calls to five minutes. This time I resorted to e-mail, but my cell rang moments later.
“Ferko will show you the grave, but he requires me to be there to accompany him,” she said.
It hadn’t dawned on me that she would make the trip, and my heart squirmed around for a second.
“There’s really no need,” I said, even though I realized she had every right to be there, if that’s what Ferko preferred.
“Bill,” she said, “I doubt you will see Ferko without my help. And he struggles with Serbo-Croatian. I can translate from Romany.”
I accepted her decision and took a second to explain that I’d be arriving from the US. In response to her usual curiosity, I outlined my plans.
“You and your ex-wife are comfortable at the same table?”
“Completely. Now that we’re no longer responsible for one another’s happiness, we get along swimmingly. I’m actually going to stay Saturday night with Ellen and her husband.”
“Dear me,” said Esma, which, truth told, reflected some of my own ambivalence about that detail. “You can tell me more in Tuzla. I shall see you Thursday week. The Blue Lamp?” Goos had already said the hotel was by a considerable margin the best choice in Tuzla.
After ringing off, I sat in my new office, drilled by a hard truth that broke through often in the wake of my conversations with Esma: I was lonely. Worse, approaching fifty-five, I remained unsettled in fundamental ways. I still approved of my choices in the last few months, but I’d made a large wager with my future—and my sense of who I was. Sitting there, I felt the cold void I’d stumble into if things didn’t turn out well.
6.
Merriwell—April 10